How To Transform Education With Video Games
Video games are essentially complex systems that very young children can learn to navigate very quickly.
What if we could leverage the skill with which games teach players to play? Consider the ease with which you learn the physics in Angry Birds, how quickly you came to understand Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. What if we could use similar strategies to help students to master traditional academic content? Many people are trying to do just that.
In Greg Toppo’s new book, The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter, he explores game-based learning in detail.
Jordan: I really enjoyed reading your book. You do a fantastic job not only of surveying the game-based learning landscape, but also of explaining the ways of thinking that are driving it.
I was struck by an observation you made about learning game developers. You write, “I found that most of them had gotten into this discipline not because they love games, but because they love children and want something better for them. After a while, I stopped counting the number of times that someone leaned in and told me, ‘I am not a big gamer.’”
I’ve also discovered a related trend that I think of as the game developer late-life moral crisis. Entrepreneurs, designers and producers who were so instrumental in forming the commercial game industry—former execs from Atari and Activision and LucasArts and Electronic Arts—now seem to be using their talents to build social impact games and educational games. I’m thankful for their commitment. But culturally speaking, both the educators’ impulse to not identify themselves as gamers and the seasoned gamers’ impulse to consider their recent projects to be ‘career shifts’ seem indicative of a strange moral polarization in the way we think about video games.
What is it about video games? We don’t talk about ‘social impact’ movies; nor do we talk about ‘educational’ books. Why do we have these bipolar gaming categories? Despite the 1.5 billion people worldwide that play games, there still seems to be a stigma—or at least there’s a narrative of alienation or marginalization that goes along with gaming, a sort of adolescent outsider rebellion kind of thing. Games have an aura of sinful pleasure about them. Perhaps this is why they are often discussed as an unhealthy and addictive temptation from which we need to protect our kids. How do you think our collective neuroses around games and screens impacts the larger conversation around education technology?
Greg: You put your finger on an unspoken piece of the conversation that really fascinates me. You’re right: We don’t talk about “social impact” movies and the like, and I think that’s for a reason. Most other forms of media don’t suffer from the same kind of odd inferiority complex that games do.
A couple of years ago at the Games for Change Festival, game designer Eric Zimmerman observed that art educators don’t spend their time thinking about “art for learning.” They’re not concerned with “educational art,” whatever that is. Book lovers don’t worry whether books are educational, he said. They’re not trying to “bookify” the world.
Yet here we are, trying to make the rather counterintuitive case that games can have a positive impact on learning. When you look at the processes happening when people play digital games, it makes perfect sense. But it still seems a surprise to many. I think in part it’s because games have always had a whiff of immorality and danger to them that other media don’t.
I blame pinball.
If you read about the history of pinball, it was originally a form of gambling, more a game of chance than skill. Flippers, which introduced the element of skill, weren’t added until after the machines were banned in many cities. It’s been more than 70 years since New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called the pinball machine a “real larceny machine” and gathered reporters together so they could watch him smash a few units to pieces, then dump them in the Hudson River – nice visuals! Pinball spent more than 30 years underground and behind curtains. Coin-op video games, which grew up alongside newly legalized machines in the 1970s and 1980s, couldn’t help but catch a whiff of danger, even though they were basically advanced hand-eye coordination trainers.
We’re still recovering, in a way – think about all those gamers in basements today, far from the watchful eyes of adults. But as more adults become gamers, they’re beginning to understand what’s really going on in gamers’ brains. To complete that process, we need to keep talking about games as naturalized parts of our intellectual lives, as tools rather than just toys. It helps, I think, that you don’t have to feed a quarter into your PlayStation to make learning happen.
I’ve always loved Georgia Tech theorist Ian Bogost’s idea for how we should understand “serious” games. He has said, only half-jokingly that he’s fine with the term if we think about games as we do cheesecake. “When you say, ‘Dude, that was a serious cheesecake,’ in that case, serious means two things,” he says. “There is a kind of care and an attention to detail, and there’s this desire and realization of a thing’s fundamental structure. This is the apotheosis of cheesecake. You have realized it.”
Jordan: You point out that any resistance we have to games in schools is really more of a general resistance to change. You write: “Even chalkboards got an icy reception from teachers in one-room school houses where large-group instruction was rarely emphasized.” Of course, any big change is likely to be met with resistance. And one of the crazy things going on in education right now is that a transition toward data-driven, digital, and interactive tools and games which provide exploratory and iterative learning experiences seems not only necessary, but How To Transform Education With Video Games:
